The return of Pamela Anderson, the ultimate pin-up girl

It's hard to think of a different actress than Pamela Anderson for the role of Shelly Gardner, the veteran showgirl of a Las Vegas show that, after decades in operation, is about to close its doors. Anderson and Shelly are not the same person, but the script for Gia Coppola's latest feature, sans Francis, seems built around the public image of the most famous blonde of the nineties, and generates a fertile dialogue between the fictional character and the actress who plays her. If Shelly, a showgirl Legendary, it symbolizes a Las Vegas that has already disappeared (that of feathers, sequins and shows with Frenchified and falsely sophisticated titles), Pamela is the last pin-up, the faded sex icon of a bygone era characterized by gender dynamics that are now questionable.

Coppola points to this tension in the discussion between Shelly and her teenage daughter, who doesn't understand how her mother could have dedicated her life to a simple "nude show," but the film deviates from this idea to draw an empathetic and melancholic ensemble portrait of an artistic community in ; a group of characters trapped in a permanent simulation who endow a painful humanity to performers in a state of grace: Anderson, moving in an unusual dramatic register, but also an unrecognizable Dave Bautista and a Jamie Lee Curtis who seems to fear nothing.

The filmmaker's impressionistic style, which unfortunately prevents her from delving deeply into some themes, ends up managing to outline the personality of her protagonist, a woman for whom the setting is more real than life itself. It is here that the actress (Anderson) and the character (Shelly) meet again: in that ambivalence between the authentic human being and the elaborate fantasy captured on a stage, in a television series or in the centerfold of a magazine. Playboy.

Pamela Anderson: "I missed out on a few decades of my own life."